The example above is a Laravel 5.5 app freshly installed from the CLI. It works as expected.

However, the identically configured app at /repo/lt-assets/public returns a 404 error for any route requested. It is also a Laravel 5.5 app, but it was added to the server by git pull from my Bitbucket repo.

So, it seems the only commonality to the non-working apps is that they satisfy both conditions: "is Laravel" && "pull from git repo". WP apps or Laravel installed form the CLI work just fine. All the apps work on Ubuntu 16.04/nginx/php7.1 dev and staging servers...which tells me it's not the underlying Laravel code per se.

The contents of the public/.htaccess files on the Laravel apps are identical:

With the VirtualHost configs and .htaccess settings, I've done everything I can find by Googling this issue. All these repos worked under the same version of UniServer that wasi nstalled on my flash drive -- this newer setup is on an SSD external drive.

I put this in the general area rather than the Apache area because I'm not completely sure it's an Apache issue. I destroyed the earlier setup on the flash drive too quickly, and don't know if the PHP module config is identical to what it was.

I'm about ready to setup the SSD again, as I know there are some subtle differences. I don't think they are anything that affects UniServer -- only my command-line functionality....things like cmdr instead of bare conEmu, cygwin instead of the GNU windows CLI tools (such as nano). One thing I suppose could be pertinent (since git pull is one of the commonalities) is that I'm using the git for Windows that's packaged with cmdr (git version 2.11.0.windows.1) rather than a separate install of 2.14.1.